TWTBACD Ch.73 - The Long Restoration

Chapter 73

The Long Restoration

2068–2070

2068-70: biodiversity rises sixteenth consecutive year

The biodiversity data released by the Global Ecological Consortium in January 2070 showed the clearest signal yet: species abundance, measured by the composite index used since 2030, had increased for the sixteenth consecutive year. Not recovered to 1970 baseline — the losses were still enormous, the extinctions already recorded were permanent — but increasing. The trajectory had definitively reversed.

The Great Rebalancing had been working for twenty-two years. The results were proportionate to twenty-two years of effort — meaningful, significant, and vastly less than what would have been possible if the effort had begun in 2000, or 1990, or 1980, which were the years the data had been making the argument.

But the trajectory was reversed. The living systems were recovering. Slowly, patchily, incompletely — but recovering.

In Serbia, Mila Petrov published the Sava River forty-year analysis. The river's summer flow had stabilised. The aquifer recharge, measured against extraction, had reached equilibrium for the first time in the dataset. The fish population was at eighty-one percent of the 2020 baseline. The monitoring network had forty-two nodes. The network had begun as a fisherman's hobby and had become a continental environmental intelligence system. Dmitri's original program, substantially modified over fifty years but continuously operational, was still its backbone.

In Iowa, the Hayes farm's restoration acreage was, by 2070, a functioning ecosystem that Claire and Travis's research team described as 'ecologically indistinguishable from pre-settlement native prairie in all measured parameters.' Eight hundred acres of American prairie, lost for a hundred and thirty years, had come back.

Susan-junior was eighteen. She went to the prairie alone, with her notebooks, on the morning the paper was published. She sat in the grass for an hour. She wrote: 'The grass is the same grass. The seeds were in the soil the whole time, waiting.'